from TechCrunch by
Duncan Riley 
Asking how many ways you can make a search engine is like asking how many ways you can scramble an egg, there are a number of different ways and although it’s not rocket science you can still end up with something inedible.
People powered search is the trendiest of egg scrambling search engine recipes at the moment. Service such as ChaCha have contractual employees answering search queries in real time. The Jason Calacanis vehicle Mahalo launched in alpha this week with a Wikipedia meets Google model which aims to provide pre-written results for 10,000 search queries.
Danville, CA based Sproose marries human powered search to Digg.
Sproose is a personalized search engine that combines social networking with peer-moderated rankings giving users the ability to prioritize, customize and fine-tune searches to produce relevant web search results.
Sproose users can effectively categorize and index relevant sites and tailor those for personal or group use. Through collective moderation and scoring users can sort through existing sites to assemble only the most appropriate results.
The results aren’t bad. It isn’t clear where the search results are originally pulled from (I’d guess Google) and the social voting feature on link priority creates a different search experience. Video results come from Blinkx and Sproose indexes over 25,000 sources for news. Whether it will take is another matter; everyone wants to be the next Google and there is no shortage of competitors. I can honestly say though that I’ve seen many worse than Sproose.
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Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Flextronics, Solectron or both -- we polled our mom on the subject, and she asked when we were going to give up this "blogging nonsense" for a real job -- but these two fairly low-profile contract electronics manufacturers churn out massive amounts of product for other little companies you might have heard of: like HP, Dell, Sony, Ericsson, Cisco, Motorola and Microsoft. Now Flextronics is ending this bitter rivalry in a Coke buys Pepsi-type shocker, forking over $3.6 billion in cash and stock for Solectron. Flextronics will operate Solectron as a subsidiary, and claims the purchase will help it expand scale and market reach, while saving on costs, with the deal to add about 15 percent to earnings, claims the manufacturer.
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